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Saturday, March 1, 2008

Christophe: Part I

Well, it's been a long day, but I guess it's time to send out 'the word' to anyone who hasn't already heard:

So, i'll cut to the point: the name-guessing contest is over, and we have a son, Christophe Joseph Wiseman. Kim was the only one to guess the first name in advance. How we got here is a bit of a long story.

Friday was a slow day - after Thursday's surprise discovery of faint contractions, we weren't sure what to expect when we went to sleep. By morning, Pierrette couldn't feel much in the way of contractions, so we mostly spent the day resting. By afternoon, I'd given up on anything happening, so I got some work done for The FeedRoom.

Although there were some contractions in the evening, nothing with enough regularity to worry about, so we went to sleep around 10:00. At about 11:30, Pierrette woke up feeling worried, as if something were wrong. She woke me up to track fetal movements and contractions. The contractions were all over the map (as they often are in early labour, and had been during hte day), but we got almost no fetal movements despite three Lindor chocolates, a Hershey's kiss and a glass of tangerine juice.

Worried, we decided to place a call to the midwives. They weighed the options of coming over with the doppler to check on baby's heartbreat, and meeting us at the hospital to do another no-stress-test, and decided to go with the latter. The first strip on the no-stress-test was fine, but it only had a single heart acceleration, which is lower than they'd like to see, so they did another twenty-minute strip. Part-way through the second strip, the baby's heartbeat dropped to 70 and got erratic for two minutes. This was enough to get an IV and oxygen into Pierrette within thirty seconds, so I guess that was worrisome.

The midwives consulted with the OB on call, and she recommended we move into a labour room, and, after further discussion, recommended we break Pierrette's waters. Since Pierrette and I were both hoping for home-birth and a very low-intervention approach, this didn't sit exceptionally well, but after talking through the available options, the midwives admitted that with the past day or two, they weren't very comfortable with a home-birth, and basically suggested we should move into accepting that a hospital birth was best for baby's health at this point.

I'll pick up this thread in the next post -- I've got a sleeping baby nearby, so I guess it's time to get some sleep myself before the baby alarm goes off again. I'vestill got to cover water-breaking, active labour, and post-labour fun. Lots to tell. And for reasons that will become evident in the next posts, thanks a lot to those who were able to help us out today - Basil, Kim, Roy, Brenda, Lisa, not to mention the 'production team' midwives from Don Mills - East York and Deanna, our Doula.